The first time I walked into Jean-Marie Le Pen’s office, it was in Brussels. Having spent months trying to secure a meeting with him in Paris, I realized that it would be a lot easier to set this up at the European Parliament – where no one wanted anything to do with him.

Countless letters to the Front National’s then head of press had created a tenuous connection with her: we had moved from “who are you exactly?” (a PhD student studying the FN), to “in principle, yes” (“but not now”), and finally to a relationship, of sorts, in which I donned the mantel of supplicant on a weekly basis and she magnanimously showed increasing amounts of calendar flexibility. We reached the high-point of our calendar courtship when she finally revealed the name and phone number of the woman who handled “le Chef’s” appointments in Brussels and the specific dates on which I was most likely to clinch an interview.

This was summer 1996. I had a studious, academic, detailed knowledge of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his party. And I had scoured countless interviews, watched him on French television and listened to him on French radio. I had read multiple accounts of populism, in Europe and elsewhere (from the nineteenth-century Russians to the emerging Europeans, via the twentieth-century Latin Americans), examined the geography of votes, the historical lineage, the Poujade references and the links to fascism and authoritarianism. And though all of it was crucial, these strands did not manage to come together to explain the increasing amount of traction that the FN exercised over French politics, the French party system and the French, tout-court.

The one thing I had not done was interact with Le Pen. So, I did not know what to expect but I expected something. I expected something to fall into place that would provide me with the insight that would bring the rest together. It took years before that crucial insight finally came into focus.